November 01, 2011

MONGOHOLY-NAZY

Roman writer/artist Stefano Tamburini (1955-1986) devoted his ten years of activity mainly to underground comics. The thing he is most famous for is 'Ranxerox', the graphic novel series beautifully drawn by Tanino Liberatore: but he also founded magazines and published zines, made revolutionary graphic experiments and even designed fashion. His vision was ages ahead of his time and his name is sacred to Italian contemporary artists of any type: yet almost nothing can be found about him on the Internet.
Tamburini was into Zap and R. Crumb and Constructivist graphic design and Dada, but first thing he was a big music fan. He loved new wave and dub, Zappa and Devo, anything that played with musical forms as he did with pictures. For him no image was to be just looked at and no image had an owner.
The page below is from the 1980 'Snake Agent' series. Mostly made of maed strips stolen from Mel Graff's 'Secret Agent X-9', it was defined by Tamburini "the first comic book attempt where the artist's role proves to be obsolete".



In 1980 Tamburini took some of his industrial and no wave records and made a tape, he called it 'Thalidomusic For Young Babies' and released it in a few under the name Mongohony-Nazy
These two Youtube excerpts seem to be the only evidence of the tape's actual existence: ten minutes of painfully oppressive soundscapes that will gently introduce everyone to Stefano's witty and brutal manners.

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4 comments:

  1. wow! had no idea about it. thanx

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  2. Cool, I'm a big fan of ranxerox so it's nice to see more from tamburini. Someone said that either him or Liberatore did a lot of heroin and that's why ranxerox is so fucked up, dunno if that's true though

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  3. the whole italy was fucked up at that time and heroin and political violence were always the main issues. liberatore never did drugs, while tamburini actually died of a heroin overdose: but he wasn't a junkie at all and everyone close to him was surprised he died that way

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  4. Italy is still fucked up an amazing. No drugs and no police between 2 beating hearts!

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